Right.
And there was no mention of NATO at the foreign policy debate.
Actually it takes two. The lack of understanding of someone else’s point can be caused by an incoherent presentation of the facts, but it can also a lack of comprehension by the receiving party.
Someone could present a perfectly phrased argument about gene splicing to me, but I could fail to comprehend because I basically know jackshit about gene splicing.
That’s how it reads to me too. But for what it’s worth, the Navy claims there are 287 deployable ships. So it would seem we are short of what we need, unless there are ships approved for or already under construction that will bring us up to speed by 2019.
Doesn’t say anything about ships under repairs, does that count?
As far as conservatives on the 'Net go, Mitt Romney won the debate. Not from his positions, apparently, but because he better positioned himself with undecided voters (as far as they’re concerned).
I was wondering if the Coast Guard is part of that number or not.
Sam Stone, You show brief flashes of understanding the basics here, and then it goes away. Most of what you’ve written in this thread is so exceptionally stupid that it takes one’s breath away.
Romney’s argument was that a reasonable measure of the sufficiency of our navy was the raw number of ships we have relative to the raw number of ships we had in 1916. This is a brain dead stupid line of reasoning, and it doesn’t take some protracted explanation to point out how. Obama did it swiftly, deftly in a very humorous, effective and memorable way. Bayonets and horses. Boom.
You can’t tweet “Well we now have the capability to launch and return drone aircraft, and our naval doctrine has varied over time since WWI and through the cold war to today.” Now THAT would have been an exceptionally stupid response, largely because it pretends that Romney’s primary argument was remotely reasonable, or at least ignores how stupid it was.
I’m sure you would have preferred that Obama didn’t expose Romney’s stupidity, but all your walls of text here pale in comparison to “bayonets and horses.”
Given the self-evident truth of this, I’m done.
Well, there’s the guy who raised the issue of how many ships we had in 1916 as if it were somehow relevant. Dunno whether a second person who doubts this assertion can be found, but a single example suffices to answer the question.
Thing is, Romney surely didn’t believe that what he was saying was relevant. But that’s the game he’s decided to play: throw out a bunch of stupid bullshit in hopes that the president drowns under it. The president is right to treat this approach with contempt.
Knock it off or take it to The BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
Well, I almost agree with this point.
Instead of going with the condescending snark he used, he would have been much more justified in pointing out that we inflated the debt to unreasonable amounts the last time a Republican president made stupid claims about the size of the Navy.
Reagan made a big deal about wanting a “600 ship Navy,” so we kept all sorts of obsolecent hulls on the books for years to give him what he wanted, (that the Navy neither wanted nor needed). I think Obama’s snark should have made a bigger deal that Republican presidents like to talk “fiscal responsibility” out one side of their mouth while trashing fiscal responsibility with their inept handling of unnecessary military procurements and maintenance.
I wonder why that might be.
Perhaps you should say that then, rather than failing to pick holes in Obama’s perfectly valid point about Romney’s naval strategy.
…at at the direction of and personal benefit to then Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, who owns private shipyards where the old buckets were patched together.
Oh, hey, who is advising Romney on Naval matters, again? Oh, right - John Lehman.
Given the link and its references, I’ll agree. He made a valid claim that we are no longer trying to match the doctrine of being able to fight two major wars simultaneously.
Now one could proceed to argue we haven’t been able to for some time, or argue the necessity, or whatever, but that I will accept as a Romney is right. Dammit.
I have a hard time reconciling the quote with the stated numerical count of 287 ships. As others have said, the only way I can parse that sentence is to mean we currently have more than 300 ships and will reduce to 300 by 2019. I give Romney partial credit, but then take them back for not mentioning that we have more ships now than we did under Bush.
The page mentions 287 deployable ships, 114 deployed ships, and 56 ships underway. 114 + 56 = 170 ships. I imagine the balance 287 - 170 = 117 ships are in ports getting serviced or whatever.
And yet I’ve already quoted where Obama went on to say essentially that.
Romney went for the sound bite, and Obama cut him off at the knees with the better sound bite.
[QUOTE= RickJay]
I wonder why that might be.
[/QUOTE]
Snerk!
I didn’t get that at all. His argument to me seemed to be that the Navy said we need 313 ships, and we only have 287 (because we’ve underfunded the military). He threw in (in what I took as an aside, a sound bite, a little illustration) that 287 is fewer than we had almost 100 years ago.
But that’s not a good illustration. It’s at best misleading and at worst it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes naval power in today’s military. Even as an aside, it is problematic.
rogerbox,
I’ve returned to report that the consensus is that Taiwan is very defensible and China is nowhere near capable of “overrunning” Taiwan.
You can argue that it’s not a good illustration, or that it’s irrelevant to any serious discussion of military capability, and you’re probably right about that, but that wasn’t my point. Romney’s main thrust is that the military was underfunded and he’ll fix that. He gave the 313 vs 287 ships example to illustrate that point, and in that regard, I think he’s kind of got a point.